news you won't find in the mainstream media

The big-government, pro-war crowd is wailing and gnashing its teeth over what has been described as the “most embarrassing and potentially damaging disclosure of American diplomatic material in decades.”

Charles Johnson, for example, is outraged that anyone would dare shine a light on the government’s dirty little secrets. Why? Because everything our Beloved Leaders do is for our safety and security, and the WikiLeaks revelations might trip them up:

I don’t recall voting for Julian Assange. As he sets himself up as the arbiter of government morality, and recklessly reveals secrets that will distort and vastly complicate international relations, and very probably cause innocent people to suffer and die, who will hold him accountable? Who does he answer to?

And those war bloggers who get their kicks from second-hand slaughter are lusting for Assange’s blood — as long as someone else is doing all the bloodletting. The prime example, of course, is Americaneocon:

When communism collapsed in Moscow, Prague and Belgrade at the end of the Cold War, ethnic nationalism surged to the surface in all three nations and tore them apart into 24 countries.

Economic nationalism is now resurgent across Europe. And it is hard to see how a transnational institution like the European Union, run by faceless bureaucrats, and the 16-nation eurozone it created long survive.

As of Monday, Greece and Ireland had been bailed out -- Greece with $145 billion, Ireland with $89 billion. All eyes have now turned to Iberia, to Portugal and Spain, where bond prices are sinking and interest rates are rising, and investors are eying the exits.

Are America's banks so well insulated from Europe's that their end of the boat can sink and ours stay afloat? The Credit Anstalt crisis of 1931 leapt from Austria to Germany to Japan to Britain to the United States.

How long will Germans play the "good Europeans" and use their savings and a solid credit rating earned through years of sacrifice to bail out deadbeat nations whose welfare states are more lavish than their own? After constant repetition, the Three Musketeers' slogan of "all for one, and one for all" can get rather tiresome.

“In this special issue The Social Contract presents an unsparing indictment, and a timely debunking, of the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC). Acclaimed expert on America’s political fringes Laird Wilcox skewers the bogus scholarship and smear tactics by which SPLC has successfully sold itself to government and media as an impartial arbiter of “hate,” in an exclusive, keynote interview with Peter Gemma. TSC’s team of accomplished contributors from the left, right, and center exposes SPLC’s unsavory methods, dubious aims, and tawdry fundraising practices with surgical precision and comprehensive scope.”

Indeed. TSC provides a linked index for every article in this issue, covering everything from SPLC’s “ritual defamations,” to their “hidden agenda,” all bearing in mind how immensely lucrative the venture has proven to be for founder Morris Dees and key executive staff.

We’ve covered the defamation/conflation angle from a gun owner perspective many times at Gun Rights Examiner. TSC expands that to show how other groups that the SPLC agenda finds convenient are also smeared in order to advance their agenda and bring in the cash.

A key observation that nicely illustrates SPLC hypocrisy when it comes to money, from an article by contributor Patrick Cleburne, notes “the $PLC now has an account in the notorious tax haven and money-laundering location of the Cayman Islands!” and that SPLC receive $2.9 million from “[t]he Picower Foundation, set up by Jeffry Picower, reliably reported to have been the biggest beneficiary of the Madoff scam.” Cleburne suggests:

In the second attack on Israel by Liberal Democrat politicians in the same week that the party’s leader said the party got it wrong on Israel, Jenny Tonge claimed on Friday that Israel’s treatment of Palestinians is the root cause of terrorism worldwide.

Possibly “Holocaust guilt” allows this treatment to go unchecked, Tonge said, adding that it might also be the “power of the pro-Israel lobby” in the UK and US.

On the issue of world conflict prevention, Tonge then said: “It is a disgrace to us all that problems such as Kashmir and Palestine are still alienating Muslims all over the world.

“The treatment of Palestinians by Israel is held up as an example of how the West treats Muslims,” she said, “and is at the root cause of terrorism worldwide.”

“Even [the Quartet’s Middle East envoy] Tony Blair has now admitted this publicly,” she claimed.

“Why do we let it continue? Is it Holocaust guilt? We should be guilty – of course we should. Is it the power of the pro-Israel lobby here and in the USA?” The peer went on say that “cynics might think” Britain is at the ready to help Israel attack Iran.

Wikileaks, following much media fanfare (reason for suspicion right there) has just released a huge number of documents supposedly leaked to WikiLeaks and no other websites'. The media is denouncing this as a threat to the United States while US politicians wring their hands and wonder when they will be free of the curse of the First Amendment and all that troublesome nonsense about Freedom of Speech. Many observers think this is a propaganda set up and that neither Julian Assange or WikiLaeks should be taken at face value. After all, Julian Assange keeps insisting there was no 9-11 conspiracy and the 9-11 truth movement a "distraction." Apparently Julian Assange has patented conspiracy and nobody else may expose one except himself!

Of course, there is really not that much that is new in this latest dump. Like prior WikiLeaks dumps, most of it is old news mixed with some rather dubious claims. In his last such dump, Julian Assange included a claim that Osama bin Laden is still alive and controlling Al Qaeda. Of course, it is well documented outside the United States that Osama bin Laden has been dead for many years and that Al Qaeda itself is a fake front group created to hoax Americans into endless wars of conquest, much as the fictional Emmanuel Goldstein was used in George Orwell's "1984."

As for the present batch of documents, again it is a rehash of stories already known to the blog-o-sphere. Even those people who did not know US diplomats spy on their United Nations counterparts did not find it surprising or in any way a new idea.

So what is the real purpose of Assange's little charade? Propaganda.

So, given that 95% of the current WikiLeaks is really old news, as a public service I will point out the bits of poison that Julian hopes you will eat.

1. Iran is bad so you should all want to kill them.

2. Saudi Arabia is bad because they are funding Al Qaeda so you should all want to kill them.

3. North Korea is bad because they gave really long range missiles to Iran for Iran to put their nuclear warheads in, so you should all want to kill them.

4. China is messing with your computers, so you should all want to kill them.

There was a Cold War joke about the Soviet press reporting the outcome of a two-man foot-race between a Soviet citizen and an American: “The Soviet runner finished right behind the winner, while the American finished next-to-last.”

That old chuckle popped into my mind upon reading Dispelling DREAM Act Myths, issued on November 23, 2010 by the Immigration Policy Center, which is the research and policy arm of the American Immigration Council [AIC].

(The AIC, in turn, seems to have an unspoken, but organic, relationship to the American Immigration Lawyers Association, since the two organizations occupy suites 200 and 300, respectively, at a common address in Washington, DC. Their phone numbers also differ by 100, so to speak. The AIC’s mission statement includes this: “The American Immigration Council believes that the dignity of the individual knows no boundary.” Whatever that means.)

According to all predictions, starting Monday, November 29 immigration-sanity patriots will once again have to man the anti-mass-amnesty barricades against the DREAM Act, the most dangerous immigration-related legislative threat to the American future since the several mass-amnesty attempts of 2006-7. So it’s vital to know what the forces of national dissolution like the AIC are serving up as talking points about DREAM for their allies.

Coming Soon BREAKING ALL THE RULES Forum

The public is invited to participate with the debate. Email batr@batr.org for your request to join. The Forum should be up on the web very soon.

A top economic adviser to the Democratic Party, speaking on deep background, told WMR that the domino-like collapse of the economies of Iceland, Greece, Ireland, and, now, possibly Spain, is coming also to the United States.

One of the triggering mechanisms will be at the end of this month when two million idled workers, now collecting unemployment, will be dropped from the rolls. At the end of December, another two million workers will join the ranks of those who have exhausted their unemployment benefits and a total of 4 million Americans will be without unemployment checks and face destitution.

Four million Americans will put financial pressure on municipalities and state governments already facing bankruptcy. Unlike Iceland, Ireland, Greece, Portugal, and, to some extent, Spain, which have strong central government control, the United States is a federal republic and, as such, the collapse of the economy will be state-by-state and begin at the municipality level, according to our source who has contacts within the Obama White House and the Democratic leadership of the Congress.

Municipalities, which guarantee the pensions of their retired employees through the issuance of municipal bonds, will find themselves faced with bankruptcy and the "Muni" bonds will be rated at junk status. Municipalities unable to pay out pensions will discover their pension funds can be bailed out by the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation (PBGC) in Washington, a federal corporation set up by the Employee Retirement Income Security Act of 1974.When the first municipality declares bankruptcy and seeks a bailout from the PBGC, there will be a domino effect, with others seeing it as a quick way out. Soon, the PBGC will, itself, be forced into bankruptcy. WMR has been told by our source it is doubtful that a Republican Congress will be interested in bailing out the PBGC.

According to Mr. Hagmann, he was contacted by a source within the DHS who provided an alarming memo detailing a new administrative directive agreed upon by DHS chief Janet Napolitano and the head of TSA John Pistole. The memo, according to Doug Hagmann, “officially addresses those who are opposed to, or engaged in the disruption of the implementation of the enhanced airport screening procedures as ‘domestic extremists’.”

The memo leaves no doubt as to who, exactly, is leading the charge to label Americans who refuse current security measures due to health and privacy concerns as extremists. “The measures to be taken in response to the negative public backlash as detailed [in this directive], have the full support of the President,” it says.

Under the new labeling procedures, those who choose to opt-out or are perceived as being troublemakers will be detained, questioned and processed for further investigation:

The terminology contained within the reported memo is indeed troubling. It labels any person who “interferes” with TSA airport security screening procedure protocol and operations by actively objecting to the established screening process, “including but not limited to the anticipated national opt-out day” as a “domestic extremist.” The label is then broadened to include “any person, group or alternative media source” that actively objects to, causes others to object to, supports and/or elicits support for anyone who engages in such travel disruptions at U.S. airports in response to the enhanced security procedures.

For individuals who engaged in such activity at screening points, it instructs TSA operations to obtain the identities of those individuals and other applicable information and submit the same electronically to the Homeland Environment Threat Analysis Division, the Extremism and Radicalization branch of the Office of Intelligence & Analysis (IA) division of the Department of Homeland Security.

Corporations have gained ascendancy in the White House, the US legislative bodies and judiciary, as well as the US agencies, some of which, such as the CIA, were created on the persuasion of, and for Wall Street. This corporate ascendancy in US power structure is now a constant and deeply embedded feature of the American domestic and international politics. The people of the US are now out of the loop completely, and perhaps permanently. Therein lies the real danger to the future of mankind.

The Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) and the Trilateral Commission (TC) were set up by the Rockefeller family, the latter in 1973. These “think tanks” work perpetually for the interests of “Big Oil” and related businesses owned by the wealthiest families of the planet. Winston Lord, former US Ambassador to China and former CFR member, once said: “The Trilateral Commission does not run the world, the Council on Foreign Relations does that.” In 1973, David Rockefeller met with 27 heads of state, as well as the Pope and representatives of China and the USSR.

The neocon movement was funded by an alternative group of wealthy men, who wanted to “roll back”, and not just contain Russia and eventually to set up a global US empire. The Olin Foundation, which funded this movement, and the American Enterprise Institute became more important as money was spent on propagating the neocon agenda.

With the advent of Reagan the neocons finally had their way and it was the neocon political trajectory that led to 9/11. It is now very clear that 9/11 was staged so that the US could, under the garb of fighting terrorism, scatter military bases worldwide and embark on its programme of military conquest. As Professor Michel Chossudovsky has put it, the war against terrorism is a “fraud”.

It seems that President Obama, Congress and especially Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke are determined to cause economic collapse in America. Some people, such as economist and investment analyst Peter Schiff and trend forecaster Gerald Celente, have been predicting that, because of Washington’s spending sprees, debts, perpetual wars and monetary printing, America is indeed headed for that economic collapse.

But one aspect of that inevitable economic collapse that really concerns me is the possibility of martial law. Celente has stated that by 2012 there will be civil unrest, looting and food riots.

If there is going to be an economic collapse along with the complete destruction of the dollar, then there probably will be rioting, looting, robberies, burglaries, muggings, vandalism and murders, which will mean that federal martial law will follow. Even the Wall Street yuppies will turn to violence, as they will need to support their addictions to Prozac and Xanax, or whatever the hell it is the Wall Street yuppies take these days.

If martial law is inevitable, then nullification and secession are in order. Thomas Jefferson sided with those who believe in the right of nullification and secession, and said that if the people of the states find secession necessary, then, by all means, “let us separate.”

With the world coming down around America, Afghanistan a hopeless quagmire, even by “Vietnam” standards, the dollar in free fall, AIPAC spying openly revealed in civil proceedings and Americans, by the million, abandoning traditional news media, the “nuclear option,” an attack on an American city by, well, Americans themselves, with or without Israel, becomes more likely.

The mechanisms are there, spy organizations, controlled press, a quick and dirty “whitewash” investigation such as with 9/11 “in the can.”

“Black ops” and intelligence groups, now little more than criminal fronts, psychopaths, misfits and degenerates of every kind, exist by the dozen, funded with billions in taxpayer revenue, defense, intelligence and, of course, the flood of drug money pouring in from Afghanistan.

What is believed by those Americans that other Americans should revile and fear? It is believed that the only way of “moving forward” is the extreme path, totalitarianism, more government, fewer rights, gun seizures and, perhaps even those FEMA camps that “internet nutcases” and “conspiracy theory” types talk about.

Thousands of America’s expensively-trained troops are fighting overseas. But what about the war right next door?

Official Washington puts on a happy face about Mexico, because Mexicans become miffed if Uncle Sucker speaks ill of them. But recently Secretary of State Hillary Clinton let slip that Mexico’s drug crime is "looking more and more like Colombia looked 20 years ago"—an indication that the Administration is not as sanguine about the Mexico meltdown as it pretends.

Curious: the Pentagon is concerned with Mexican public opinion—but not about Americans’ reaction to increased involvement with our narco-state neighbor.

The new class of Congressional budget cutters should ask why any taxpayer’s money is being spent on Mexico’s internal affairs. The fact that the Pentagon has "counternarcotics funding" for Mexico in the tens of millions of dollars is outrageous—but the State Department funnels a lot more money south, and amounts are not public knowledge.

It’s time for Washington to stop being the globalist World Police and get back to its fundamental duty: defending the sovereignty and security of these United States.

Imagine that Yasser Arafat had succeeded in ending Israeli occupation and establishing a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza. Now imagine that 10 or 15 years later, new Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas, agreed to hand over control of his country's budget to the IMF so his people's future would be controlled by outsiders. Do you think Palestinians would praise Abbas as a patriot or denounce him as a traitor?

Irish Prime Minister Brian Cowen is Mahmoud Abbas. He's caved in to the demands of foreign capital and transferred control over the nation's budget to the EU and the IMF. Here's an excerpt from a November 24, article in Reuters:

"Ireland's teetering government will announce plans on Wednesday to cut welfare spending sharply and raise taxes to help pay for the country's catastrophic banking crisis and meet the terms of an international bailout.

The four-year plan to save 15 billion euros is a condition for an EU/IMF rescue under negotiation for a country long feted as a model of economic development that has become the latest casualty in the euro zone's emergency ward.

Prime Minister Brian Cowen told parliament no final figure had been agreed for financial assistance, "but an amount of the order of 85 billion (euros) has been discussed.

AIPAC (American Israel Public Affairs Committee), is a sham. The group has, over the years, destroyed anyone who has tried to have it named what it really is, a dangerous foreign lobby and nest of spies. AIPAC is the most feared organization in Washington and most powerful, above any law. A former employee of AIPAC, Steve Rosen, who AIPAC claims was a spy, more appropriately a “caught” spy, now claims his former employer does nothing but spy.

Rosen stands to get $20 million in his defamation lawsuit against AIPAC. He isn’t without motive but we have also learned that Rosen has considerable documentation of AIPAC receiving and disseminating classified information, received from, well, we have to call them traitors, inside the US government.

We know that a vast spy ring operates in Washington and that Israel is the center of it. We also know that Israel, Turkey, India, Pakistan, China and Russia trade American secrets back and forth like baseball cards. We know that AIPAC is deeply involved in this spying.

We know that AIPAC claims to hold signed letters of unconditional support from 80% of the members of congress, all of whom received campaign contributions arranged by AIPAC, with many elections financed almost entirely by AIPAC, a group involved, according to the Washington Post and Steve Rosen, in spying on the United States with seeming complicity by the FBI itself.

We know that the majority of policy makers in both the Bush and Obama administrations have been AIPAC members, actual citizens of Israel itself and are responsible for formulating and driving the disastrous policies that have brought America to near extinction as a force in the world.

Michael Scheuer, a Fox News 'terrorism expert,' during a discussion on Fox and Friends this evening called for the U.S. to act "like a superpower," and "destroy" North Korea's Navy.

While discussing North Korea's attack on a South Korean island, Scheuer also said that the U.S. should have attacked North Korea "months ago" when "they sank that North Korean or South Korean boat."

Host Brian Kilmeade begins by asking, "Michael, first off, what message did North Korea send, and what message can we send back as the chief ally to South Korea, this morning after they sent fire into that island last night?"

"I think the message they sent was they don't believe we're going to defend the South Koreans to any great extent," explains Scheuer. "The message we should have sent when they sank that North Korean boat or South Korean boat several months ago was we should have destroyed as much of North Korean Navy as we could immediately. I also suspect that we should have destroyed, had been ready to hit them again this morning because now the media and the politicians will talk their way out of defending South Korea and let the North Koreans get away with another act of war."

"So, the heck with what China thinks? Just go take them out because we are assigned...we are an assigned defender of South Korea?" queries Kilmeade.

The voice of controlled opposition wants Americans to believe that the Tester Amendment to S 510, the Food Safety Modernization Act, elevates the bill to something we should adopt. The Tester Amendment puts a bandaid on a head wound. It does not stop the most lethal agency in American history from seizing control of the food supply from farm to fork.

Even though Big Ag now opposes S 510, we should continue to oppose the bill, as it amounts to federal assault on food freedom. Agribusiness giants have always opposed the exemption provided in the Tester Amendment. Now that it’s included in the current form of S.510, they’re only making clear that they oppose giving any wiggle room to competition. But from their sudden opposition to S 510, because it now includes an amendment they have always opposed, the public is being lulled into a false sense of confidence in S 510.

The Tester Amendment amounts to putting lipstick on a pig. It’s still a pig, and it still needs to be slaughtered.

The Tester Amendment does not go far enough. As the dollar crashes, how much is $500,000 a year going to be worth? That’s the lower revenue limit on food producers affected by the amendment; and it only exempts them from having to submit a food safety plan. This exemption does not exclude them from everything else in the bill. Small producers will still be wiped out by the hyper-regulation proposed in S 510, as will non-exempt medium-sized producers. History is repeating itself: small and medium-sized meat packers were destroyed by Bill Clinton’s HACCP – the Hazard Analysis Critical Control Point plan adopted under the guise of food safety. Meat did not get any safer; all that happened was that fewer meat packers exist today.

What is the most immediate danger for 300 million Americans from the limitless bailout of the most politically powerful special interest group in America, the bankers of Wall Street? Author and financial expert Daniel R. Amerman, CFA, illustrates the very real danger of a 12% to 28% plunge in the standard of living for the average family, and shows how it could occur in a matter of weeks or months.

Initial reports were unequivocal: those crazy North Koreans had once again broken the longstanding ceasefire and attacked the South, this time at Yeonpyeong Island, shelling civilian quarters, and killing two South Korean marines. A few hours later, however, a more nuanced story came out: it seems the South Koreans were conducting military “exercises” near the disputed island, which North Korea claims as its territory, and South Korean ships had opened fire, albeit – they claim – not in the direction of the North Korean mainland. The North Koreans responded by taking it up a few notches, as is their wont, and opening fire on Yeonpyeong.

Yet the headlines in the Western media belied such subtleties: “World Condemns Deadly N. Korean Artillery Attack,” blared CNN, while the War Street Journal declared “US Envoy: N. Korea Initiated Artillery Exchange With S. Korea,” and ABC News dutifully reported President Obama’s “outrage” over the attack. The smoke had barely cleared above Yeonpyeong before Western analysts were coming out with various “explanations” for what was characterized as a burst of unprovoked North Korean “aggression”:

There is but one solution to the Korean conundrum: the complete withdrawal of US troops, who are being held hostage, in any event, by the prospect of a North Korean nuclear strike. Do we really want to sacrifice some 20,000 American soldiers on the altar of our cold war prerogatives?

Without US interference, the two Koreas would have reunified long ago: we have created an untenable situation which threatens to lunge out of our control at any moment. What is needed is a restoration of the “sunshine policy,” a negotiated end to the Korean war – no, we never signed a peace treaty! – and the withdrawal of US forces. Then and only then will peace blossom on the Korean peninsula.

Ten years ago, in 1992, a new suspect was added to the list. Former Rep. Paul Findley (R-Ill.) made the little-noticed but intriguing comment in the March 1992 issue of The Washington Report on Middle East Affairs that "it is interesting but not surprising to note that in all the words written about the assassination of John F. Kennedy, Israel’s intelligence agency, the Mossad, has never been mentioned, despite the obvious fact Mossad complicity is as plausible as any of the other theories."

What Findley did not know was at that very time I was in the process of preparing a volume contending that the Mossad role alongside the CIA in the JFK assassination, was, in fact, the big secret—the "missing link"—that explained the entirety of the JFK conspiracy. http://afrocubaweb.com/news/mossadjfk.htm#top>

The Mossad role is what I have also called "the secret picture on the other side of the jigsaw puzzle" of the JFK assassination conspiracy. My book summarizing this theory is entitled Final Judgment.

What I find quite remarkable is that while many Israelis today believe that Israeli intelligence played a part in the assassination of Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, many of Israel’s friends in America have reacted quite hysterically to my contention that the Mossad played a role in the assassination of America’s president.

In addition, although there are many who believe that the CIA had a hand in the JFK assassination, quite a few of those same people are fearful of mentioning the likelihood of a Mossad role. Yet, as journalist Andrew Cockburn has pointed out:

The question is: if the scanners are potentially dangerous, then why has the government been in such an all-fire rush to implement them?

First, we have to recognize that we are ruled by an elite class of individuals who are completely out of touch with the travails of the average American. The government officials who have foisted these scanners on us -- President Obama, whose stimulus funds are paying for the scanners; members of Congress, who have pushed for the technology to be implemented in the airports; and Janet Napolitano and John Pistole, who have been adamant about subjecting the American people to all manner of indignities and rights violations for the sake of security -- don’t have to go through the scanners (they have the luxury of flying on private or government planes and having security clearances that allow them to breeze past such barriers), so there’s no risk to them medically.

Second, we are -- and have been for some time -- the unwitting victims of a system so corrupt that those who stand up for the rule of law and aspire to transparency in government are in the minority. This corruption is so vast it spans all branches of government -- from the power-hungry agencies under the executive branch and the corporate puppets within the legislative branch to a judiciary that is, more often that not, elitist and biased towards government entities and corporations. The scanners are a perfect example of this collusion between corporate lobbyists and government officials.

Third, we are relatively expendable in the eyes of government -- faceless numbers of individuals who serve one purpose, which is to keep the government machine running through our labor and our tax dollars. Those in power aren’t losing any sleep over the indignities we are being made to suffer or the possible risks to our health. All they care about are power and control.

North Korea fired dozens of coastal artillery shells, some of which fell on the South’s Yeonpyaong Island near the tense western inter-Korean border, the Joint Chiefs of Staff said Tuesday.

“The North fired dozens of artillery rounds from its Gaemeori western coastal artillery base at 14:34 p.m. In response to the military provocations, we fired back dozens of rounds with K9 self-propelled howitzers,” JCS spokesman Col. Lee Bung-woo told reporters.

In the artillery firing, one marine solider was killed while a dozen others suffered injuries, as of press time. The military was trying to evacuate civilians on the island near the border. Several civilians were reported to have suffered injuries.

The firing came as the South was carrying out a live-fire exercise in waters off the Bangnyeong Island and the Yeonpyeong Island as part of the annual nine-day Hoguk Exercise, aimed at enhancing interoperability and defense capabilities against North Korea.

The Republicans control the House of Representatives and are bracing for a long battle over the President’s health care proposal. In the spirit of bipartisanship and sanity, I propose that the first thing on the chopping block should be an ineffective organization that wastes money, violates our rights, and encourages us to make decisions that imperil our safety. I’m talking about the Transportation Security Administration.

Bipartisan support should be immediate. For fiscal conservatives, it’s hard to come up with a more wasteful agency than the TSA. For privacy advocates, eliminating an organization that requires you to choose between a nude body scan or genital groping in order to board a plane should be a no-brainer.

But won’t that compromise safety? I doubt it. The airlines have enormous sums of money riding on passenger safety, and the notion that a government bureaucracy has better incentives to provide safe travels than airlines with billions of dollars worth of capital and goodwill on the line strains credibility. This might be beside the point: in 2003, William Anderson incisively argued that some of the steps that airlines (and passengers) would have needed to take to prevent the 9/11 disaster probably would have been illegal.

The odds of dying from a terrorist attack are much lower than the odds of dying from doing any of a number of incredibly mundane things we do every day. You are almost certainly more likely to die or be injured driving to the airport than you are to be injured by a terrorist once you’re in the air, even without a TSA. Indeed, once you have successfully made it to the airport, the most dangerous part of your trip is over. Until it’s time to drive home, that is.

In the United States, if a policeman stops you for a traffic violation, and you offer him a $20 bill to forget about the whole thing, you’ll likely end up in jail.

But if you leave your Federal government job and go work as a consultant to the very industry you used to regulate, you won’t go to jail—you’ll grow rich. Very rich.

Michael Chertoff is the poster boy for this institutionalized corruption going on in America today. He is not unique. He is not an outlier of any bell curve. If anything, Chertoff’s form of corruption is average—it’s ordinary. It’s what everyone is doing: Everything within the law, everything that the law says he ought to be doing—yet the net effect is a blatant corruption that is personally despicable, and socially disastrous.

Michael Chertoff was the head of the Homeland Security Agency from February of 2005, to January of 2009. But after he left, he formed an outfit called The Chertoff Group—and was promptly hired by an obscure company called Rapiscan Systems.

The Chertoff Group, according to their website, “provides strategic security advice and assistance, risk management strategy and business development solutions for commercial and government clients on a broad array of homeland and national security issues.”

That sounds . . . impressively vague. Slippery as a greased stripper’s pole, actually. So let’s approach this a different way: What does Michael Chertoff do?

McCain’s preemptive strike on Rand Paul is an indication of just how nervous the War Party is about its increasingly tenuous position: in the GOP, at least, it can’t allow any deviation from the party line of perpetual war and skyrocketing “defense” expenditures, especially with a budget crisis looming on the horizon. For the logic of the “tea party” revolt against spending and big government requires, as Sen. Coburn put it, that “nothing is sacrosanct” – no, not Lockheed’s profit margin, nor even the hegemonic fantasies of Bill Kristol and the Kagan Clan.

The logic of the anti-spending, anti-big government sentiment that swept over a hundred congressional Democratic incumbents out of office, and spawned a national grassroots activist movement, leads inevitably to anti-interventionism. Because the fact of the matter, simply put, is that our overseas wars are unsustainable. We can return to fiscal sanity, or we can continue our rampage through Central Asia, slaughtering innocents and creating more terrorists in our wake – but we cannot do both.

A few days after his slam-dunk election victory, Senator-elect Paul appeared on This Week with Christiane Amanpour and not only came out for cuts in the military, but also made the case that a decade of war and occupation in Afghanistan may indeed be enough. For that he is being attacked by the War Party, as well as the administration loyalists among the liberals, and you can bet the smears have just begun. He has so far shown that he is every inch his father’s son, and I very much regret implying – or, rather, openly stating – otherwise. Rand Paul proved me wrong, and I have never been happier to make a public contrition.

The movement of which Rand Paul is a leader has the potential to turn American politics – and American conservatism – upside down, and pull off a fundamental political realignment in this country. No amount of smears and jeers from the upholders of the status quo is going to stop them, at this point: only they can stop themselves, by failing to follow through on the bright promise of their pledge to cut the American State down to its proper and constitutionally-mandated size – both at home, and abroad.

When Congress convenes for its lame-duck session on Nov. 29, it will be asked by Speaker Pelosi and Majority Leader Reid to vote on an amnesty bill deceptively called the "Dream Act" by its open-borders supporters. If passed, it will be a nightmare for the rule of law and a death knell for genuine immigration reform.

That this amnesty bill is being taken up by the lame-duck session of a Congress that has been soundly repudiated by the American people is bad enough. Lame-duck sessions ought to consider only emergency bills with broad bipartisan backing, not contentious measures that can only be passed by politicians who can ignore the will of voters. But that is eerily in keeping with the dishonest character of the long debate over the Dream Act.

I say the debate is dishonest because the bill's true intent is hidden behind humanitarian appeals, deceptive numbers and misrepresentations. Most dishonest of all is the insistence that enacting this amnesty for over 2 million individuals will not have any incentive effect for others who will rationally calculate that they can get the same thing for their children if they can smuggle them across our border.

For the past 30 years, each amnesty has been sold to Congress as "the last amnesty," and each one lays the groundwork for the next. That anyone chooses to believe the opposite is testimony to the power of self-deception.

Barack Obama, the latest rotating imperator of the first global empire, will arrive in Lisbon on November 19 to receive the plaudits of 27 North Atlantic Treaty Organization allies and secure their continued fealty on issues ranging from the war in Afghanistan to a continental interceptor missile system, the continued deployment of American tactical nuclear weapons in Europe, participation in the Pentagon’s cyber warfare plans and expanded military missions in the planet’s south and east.

Perfunctory discussions of minor details notwithstanding, strictly pro forma to maintain the myth of NATO being a “military alliance of democratic states in Europe and North America,” the banners and pennants of 26 European nations, Canada and dozens of other countries contributing troops for the Afghan mission will be lowered in the presence of the leader of the world imperium.

No fewer than 38 European nations have supplied NATO troops for the Afghanistan-Pakistan war as well as providing training grounds and transport centers to support the war effort. As envisioned for at least a century, through peaceful means or otherwise, Europe has been united, not so much by the European Union as under the NATO flag and on the killing fields of Afghanistan. It is now relegated to the role of pre-deployment training area and forward operating base for military campaigns downrange: The Middle East, Africa and Asia.

So uncritically and unquestioningly compliant has Europe been in the above regards that Obama and the governing elite in the imperial metropolis as a whole have already looked beyond the continent for additional military partners. With the exception of fellow members of the NATO Quint – Britain, Germany, France and Italy (Britain more and Italy less than the others) – Alliance partners are accorded the same status and assigned the same functions as American territories like Puerto Rico, Guam and the Northern Mariana Islands: Geopolitically convenient locations for live-fire military training and for troop, warplane and warship deployments.

The country's political, cultural and intellectual leadership -- both liberal and conservative -- denies social reality and ignores the historical record, and therefore inevitably betrays the interests of the people, leading America down a path that means ever greater anxiety and ever more rapid decline.

The leadership of both major parties, along with the mainstream media and the educational establishment, support and relentlessly promote an egalitarian-universalist ideology, an outlook of wishful thinking divorced from reality that refuses to acknowledge the most elementary truths of society, of heredity, and of history. In accord with our leaders' illusory principles and unrealistic policies, American society is rapidly becoming ever more confused, divided and disordered.

Whether Republican or Democrat, our political leaders lack candor, an informed view of history and the world, and a reality-based vision of the future.

Americans who call themselves conservatives, libertarians or "tea party" people have a simple explanation of why America has gone off track. The problem, they say, is that government is too big, and that it plays too large a role in public life. The solution to our problems, they say, is to reduce the size and role of government. That means, for example, no national health care program. They also say that the US must return to what they say are the principles and policies of the early American constitutional republic.

California computer programmer John Tyner attracted national attention recently when he posted a video shot from his cell phone in which he is heard refusing to allow a security officer to probe his groin area during a frisking at San Diego Airport on Nov. 13.

Tyner did this despite the fact the officer threatened him with a $10,000 lawsuit if he did not comply. The video was viewed by tens of thousands of people and has now spurred mass citizen outrage over “big brother” invasions of privacy.

Pennsylvania activist Aaron Bolinger is a staunch opponent of these types of security tactics, which include full body scans at airports and the development of identification cards and drivers licenses loaded with personal data on the card holder. Under federal standards, these cards would become a new type of trackable ID card (REAL ID) capable of containing sensitive, private financial and medical information as well.

Bolinger, legislative director of the National Veterans Committee on Constitutional Affairs (NVCCA.net), has informed AFP that the organization’s new workbook, American Leadership, contains detailed legislation that could be introduced immediately to put a stop to invasive, unnecessary security measures initiated at airports and in other public buildings.

“It’s our collection of over 30 pieces of model legislation,” said Bolinger, who strongly believes in getting state and local lawmakers to play a major role in resisting federal tyranny. “There’s county-level stuff. There is sheriff-level stuff.”

On November 19 and 20, NATO leaders meet in Lisbon for what is billed as a summit on “NATO’s Strategic Concept”. Among topics of discussion will be an array of scary “threats”, from cyberwar to climate change, as well as nice protective things like nuclear weapons and a high tech Maginot Line boondoggle supposed to stop enemy missiles in mid-air. The NATO leaders will be unable to avoid talking about the war in Afghanistan, that endless crusade that unites the civilized world against the elusive Old Man of the Mountain, Hassan i Sabah, eleventh century chief of the Assassins in his latest reincarnation as Osama bin Laden. There will no doubt be much talk of “our shared values”.

Most of what they will discuss is fiction with a price tag.

The one thing missing from the Strategic Concept summit agenda is a serious discussion of strategy.

This is partly because NATO as such has no strategy, and cannot have its own strategy. NATO is in reality an instrument of United States strategy. Its only operative Strategic Concept is the one put into practice by the United States. But even that is an elusive phantom. American leaders seem to prefer striking postures, “showing resolve”, to defining strategies.

One who does presume to define strategy is Zbigniew Brzezinski, godfather of the Afghan Mujahidin back when they could be used to destroy the Soviet Union. Brzezinski was not shy about bluntly stating the strategic objective of U.S. policy in his 1993 book The Grand Chessboard: “American primacy”. As for NATO, he described it as one of the institutions serving to perpetuate American hegemony, “making the United States a key participant even in intra-European affairs.” In its “global web of specialized institutions”, which of course includes NATO, the United States exercises power through “continuous bargaining, dialogue, diffusion, and quest for formal consensus, even though that power originates ultimately from a single source, namely, Washington, D.C.”

The Transportation Safety Administration is bringing the war home – and the American people don’t like it one bit. Stories of TSA outrages are everywhere, from the "Don’t touch my junk" guy to that photo of a nun in full robes being searched by a TSA thuglet. Talk radio is up in arms, Judge Napolitano is having a conniption, and both liberals and conservatives seem to be uniting around a general consensus that this level of intrusiveness cannot be allowed to stand. Yet what is to be done?

Rep. Ron Paul has introduced legislation in Congress that would forbid government employees from groping, poking, inserting, or otherwise violating one’s person, and prosecute them for doing what would be illegal if an ordinary citizen dared try it. Unfortunately, the bill isn’t likely to go anywhere – and, even if it did, passage wouldn’t get to the root of the problem. Because the real source of our troubles isn’t the TSA, or Homeland Security, nor is it any of the clueless bureaucrats who populate these agencies: the real problem, as Rep. Paul understands very well, is our foreign policy of permanent war.

Since the end of the cold war, US foreign policy has been focused on maintaining our imagined position as the world’s sole superpower, and that means intervening in every "crisis," arbitrating every dispute, dispensing dollars and discipline to the elites of every nation. Hypnotized by the myth of our alleged invulnerability, which is just another aspect of our much-touted "American exceptionalism," the 9/11 terrorist attacks traumatized the national psyche. A good part of the rage that followed the attacks was rooted in this illusion-shattering effect, and there was only one way to repair the damage: the rampage that began with the invasion of Iraq, extended into Central Asia, and, today, shows no signs of ending.

The problem, however, is that this response has only succeeded in underscoring our vulnerabilities. The Shoe Bomber compelled us to give up our shoes to the TSA. The Underwear Bomber gave the government access to our genitalia. And soon enough the Suppository Bomber will give them free entry to the very crevasses of our personhood, and what is left of our dignity will perish along with the Constitution.

By a vote of 74 to 25, at noon today, the U.S. Senate voted for cloture on S 510, the Food Safety Modernization Act, which means it must now be voted on in the full Senate within 60 days. All amendments to the controversial food control bill must be completed by that time.

None of the supporters of S 510 will acknowledge the corrupt nature of the Food and Drug Administration. Monsanto executives now work at the FDA or on President’s Obama’s Food Safety Task Force.

What legislators continue to ignore from the public is that we do not support giving federal agencies even more power — especially over something as inherently private as food choices.

None of the legislators will discuss the FDA raids on natural food operations which sickened no one, while it allowed Wright County Egg to sicken people for decades before finally taking action.

Yesterday, Senator Bob Casey informed his Pennsylvania constituents that the $1.6 billion price tag for S 510 will stop food smuggling in the United States. I kid you not:

"These provisions add personnel to detect, track and remove smuggled food and call for the development and implementation of strategies to stop food from being smuggled into the United States."

Since the attempted bombing of a US airliner on Christmas Day, former Homeland Security secretary Michael Chertoff has given dozens of media interviews touting the need for the federal government to buy more full-body scanners for airports.

What he has made little mention of is that the Chertoff Group, his security consulting agency, includes a client that manufactures the machines. Chertoff disclosed the relationship on a CNN program Wednesday, in response to a question.

An airport passengers’ rights group on Thursday criticized Chertoff’s use of his former government credentials to advocate for a product that benefits his clients.

“Mr. Chertoff should not be allowed to abuse the trust the public has placed in him as a former public servant to privately gain from the sale of full-body scanners under the pretense that the scanners would have detected this particular type of explosive,’’ said Kate Hanni, founder of FlyersRights.org, which opposes the use of the scanners.

Congressman Ron Paul (R-Texas) introduced the “American Traveler Dignity Act” on November 17 to rein in the intrusive and invasive airport searches by the federal Transportation Security Administration (TSA).

Ron Paul’s legislation would establish that the security screeners who grope travelers and gawk at their nude pictures be subject to the same laws as anyone else. “My legislation is simple,” Paul said in a statement available at his website. “It establishes that airport security screeners are not immune from any US law regarding physical contact with another person, making images of another person, or causing physical harm through the use of radiation-emitting machinery on another person. It means they are subject to the same laws as the rest of us.”

The principle behind the legislation is simple: If an individual can be arrested for groping another individual, why shouldn't a TSA agent also be subject to arrest when he does exactly the same thing?

The Congressman continued: “Imagine if the political elites in our country were forced to endure the same conditions at the airport as business travelers, families, senior citizens, and the rest of us. Perhaps this problem could be quickly resolved if every cabinet secretary, every member of Congress, and every department head in the Obama administration were forced to submit to the same degrading screening process as the people who pay their salaries.” Perhaps the political elites would re-evaluate their position on the peeping and probing Toms at the TSA; perhaps they would be willing to support the Congressman’s legislation.

Senate Bill 510, the Food Safety Modernization Act, has been called "the most dangerous bill in the history of the United States of America." It would grant the U.S. government new authority over the public's right to grow, trade and transport any foods. This would give Big brother the power to regulate the tomato plants in your backyard. It would grant them the power to arrest and imprison people selling cucumbers at farmer's markets. It would criminalize the transporting of organic produce if you don't comply with the authoritarian rules of the federal government.

"It will become the most offensive authority against the cultivation, trade and consumption of food and agricultural products of one's choice. It will be unconstitutional and contrary to natural law or, if you like, the will of God." - Dr. Shiv Chopra, Canada Health whistleblower (http://shivchopra.com/?page_id=2)

This tyrannical law puts all food production (yes, even food produced in your own garden) under the authority of the Department of Homeland Security. Yep -- the very same people running the TSA and its naked body scanner / passenger groping programs.

This law would also give the U.S. government the power to arrest any backyard food producer as a felon (a "smuggler") for merely growing lettuce and selling it at a local farmer's market.

In some of these plutocracies, the richest 1 percent of the population gobbles up 20 percent of the national pie.

But guess what? You no longer need to travel to distant and dangerous countries to observe such rapacious inequality. We now have it right here at home — and in the aftermath of Tuesday’s election, it may get worse.

The richest 1 percent of Americans now take home almost 24 percent of income, up from almost 9 percent in 1976. As Timothy Noah of Slate noted in an excellent series on inequality, the United States now arguably has a more unequal distribution of wealth than traditional banana republics like Nicaragua, Venezuela and Guyana.

C.E.O.’s of the largest American companies earned an average of 42 times as much as the average worker in 1980, but 531 times as much in 2001. Perhaps the most astounding statistic is this: From 1980 to 2005, more than four-fifths of the total increase in American incomes went to the richest 1 percent.

That’s the backdrop for one of the first big postelection fights in Washington — how far to extend the Bush tax cuts to the most affluent 2 percent of Americans. Both parties agree on extending tax cuts on the first $250,000 of incomes, even for billionaires. Republicans would also cut taxes above that.

A remarkable confluence of recent events has brought unprecedented but very welcome attention to both U.S. monetary policy and the global political economy in general.

First, Federal Reserve Board Chairman Ben Bernanke recently announced that the Fed would embark upon another round of monetary easing by purchasing $600 billion worth of U.S. Treasury debt. This amounts to an admission that markets have run out of patience with our profligacy, and therefore our own central bank literally must serve as the buyer of last resort for Treasury debt.

Second, World Bank president Robert Zoellick openly suggested that gold could play a helpful role in the global monetary system by serving as reference against more volatile fiat currencies. This is almost heresy coming from a neoconservative globalist like Mr. Zoellick. It hints at an obvious but unspoken truth that is anathema to politicians and central bankers alike: namely, that gold could be viewed as…. money!

Finally, Mr. Obama attended the G20 summit in South Korea last week and found a very chilly reception for his vision of American economic policy. Mr. Obama argued for continued worldwide stimulus, via continued debasing of the U.S. dollar, to bolster American exports. Several powerful European and Asian finance ministers, however, rejected this approach out of hand as nothing short of a currency war. They are committed to austerity measures at home, and don’t want to let the U.S. simply monetize its past sins at their expense.

The article below from the Irish Independent, informing’ the Irish people that they must go to the IMF, coming from a former chief economist from the IMF, is nothing less than a pathetically thinly disguised piece of propaganda portraying the pirates of the IMF as benevolent bankers who care for the welfare of the Irish people.

Ask any ordinary person in the Third World after these gangsters have moved in and crippled them with debt if they think the IMF is a good thing and I think you’ll find an overwhelming majority, discounting the corrupt despots running these countries, who have seen their natural resources raped by international corporations, who have looted and pillaged every country they’ve gone into at the IMF’s behest for their international banker criminal cartel, you’ll find a resounding rejection of any such notion.

The so called ‘Irish’ government are as despotic and corrupt as any of the Third World leaders. The only difference is that they don’t openly slaughter large numbers of people in the process, although poisoning of the water supply, our air and our food is also a less overt way of killing off the ‘undesirables’.

Yep, that’s you and me folks and don’t think for a second that there aren’t those in power in Ireland who know this is going on. If visitors to this website can find the information, then surely the apparent ‘creme de la creme’ of Ireland who are supposedly running the country can find out too?

The fact is that they are bought and paid for by the very same psychopathic bankers and corporate whores who want to rape Ireland of its resources and publically owned, or at least semi owned companies, to include all utility companies and our vast oil and gas resources which if used for the benefit of the Irish people would see Irelands debt wiped out overnight and unbridled prosperity for every citizen in the country a distinct possibility. Nobody dares ask the question; What happens when the family silver is sold off for peanuts and we’re still in debt to the same bankers? What do you sell next?

Soros is a Jewish tycoon and mastermind of ultra-modern colonialism. He is also a thug who is deployed as an economic hitman for the British empire.

The first claim comes from a video produced by Iran’s Ministry of Intelligence which has depicted Soros operating out of the Situation Room in the White House, while the second comes from Hector A Rivas Jr at LaRouchePAC, serving longtime presidential aspirant Lyndon LaRouche.

Now comes Glenn Beck, asking ominously about President Obama’s channels of communication: “Have you ever wondered who is at the other end of a BlackBerry?”

Who else but Obama’s puppet master, the omnipotent George Soros.

Soros the macro-managing controller of global events is also the micro-manager of Obama’s daily agenda. He really has taken multi-tasking to a supernatural level as he steers the global financial markets, runs his empire of 501(c)3s, and tells Obama what to do!

May whites have a racial identity? Are they allowed to be glad they are white or to think about what is good for them as a group?

Shelby Steele, a black scholar at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University doesn’t say “no”; he says “hell no”.

“[B]eyond an identity that apologizes for white supremacy, absolutely no white identity is permissible. In fact, if there is a white racial identity today it would have to be white guilt—a shared, even unifying, lack of racial moral authority.” [White Guilt: How Black and Whites Together Destroyed the Promise of the Civil Right Era, by Shelby Steele]

Dr. Steele continues: “Black children today are hammered with the idea of racial identity and pride, yet racial pride in whites constitutes a grave evil. Say ‘I’m white and I’m proud’ and you are a Nazi.”

Dr. Steele means all whites everywhere: “Today’s whites, the world over, cannot openly have a racial identity.” [Yo, Howard! Why did Dean have to embrace the Confederate flag? OpinionJournal.com, November 13, 2003]

The Institute for Policy Studies (IPS), a Washington-based think tank, recently carried a favorable review of a book by Howard Zinn.

While the reviewer — IPS co-founder Marcus Raskin — designates Zinn "the people's historian," nowhere is it mentioned that the late Mr. Zinn was a member of the Communist Party. His lying take on "history" has poisoned the minds of children in schools from K-12 and in universities from coast-to-coast. (See this column "Howard Zinn: Communist Liar," Aug. 9, 2010, and "Is it safe to send your child to school?," Sept. 7, 2010.)

So what else is new?

In IPS's 47-year history, this far-left entity has offered up a potpourri of the historically shadowy Old Left and the noisier, in-your-face New Left, which emerged in the sixties.

Raskin and his IPS co-founder Richard Barnet were veterans of the early-months Kennedy administration. They soon bailed out because in their view JFK and his top advisors were lagging in what Raskin and Barnet saw as the ultimate imperative — disarmament (with or without Soviet reciprocity). The result was their formation of the IPS as a 501-c-3 — eligible for tax-exempt donations. (BTW — the year after these two veteran peaceniks left for lack of progress with U.S. disarmament, Soviet missiles were planted on the soil of Cuba — 90 miles offshore. Imagine President Kennedy trying to deal with the Soviets then from a position of weakness suggested by unilateral disarmament.)

The list of criminal actions by presidents Bush and Obama, Vice President Cheney, the CIA, the NSA, the US military, and other branches of the government is long and growing. For example, both president Bush and vice president Cheney violated US and international laws against torture. Amnesty International and the American Civil Liberties Union responded to Bush’s recent admission that he authorized torture with calls for a criminal investigation of Bush’s crime.

The US government’s contempt for the rule of law took another step when President Bush violated the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act and had the National Security Agency bypass the FISA court and spy on Americans without warrants. The New York Times is on its high horse about the rule of law in Burma, but when a patriot revealed to the Times that Bush was violating US law, the Times’ editors sat on the leak for one year until after Bush was safely re-elected.

President Obama has made himself complicit in the crimes of his predecessor by refusing to enforce the rule of law. In his criminality, Obama has actually surpassed Bush. Bush is the president of extra-judicial torture, extra-judicial detention, extra-judicial spying and invasions of privacy, but Obama has one-upped Bush. Obama is the president of extra-judicial murder.

Not only is Obama violating the sovereignty of an American ally, Pakistan, by sending in drones and special forces teams to murder Pakistani civilians, but in addition Obama has a list of American citizens whom he intends to murder without arrest, presentation of evidence, trial and conviction.

The most massive change brought by Obama is his assertion of the right of the executive branch to murder whomever it wishes without any interference from US and international law. The world has not seen such a criminal government as Obama’s since Joseph Stalin’s and Hitler’s.

This election season we’ve heard an awful lot from the tea partiers about the Constitution, and specifically about the Founding Fathers, who are held up as exemplars to be emulated. Now, that’s a good idea as far as I’m concerned, because if we hark back to the legacy of the Founders, and take it seriously, and apply it to the 21st century, there would be no PATRIOT Act, no spying on Americans by their own government, – and certainly no TSA agents poking and prodding American citizens every time they want to get on a plane! And there would be no American Empire, either.

You know, I have often found myself in the position of being called an “isolationist.” Now, of course, there is no such thing as an isolationist: humans naturally gather together in communities, and the only isolationists are those holy hermits of times past, who went out into the desert to commune with God. Yes, but they always came back, didn’t they – not least because they wanted to communicate their sacred visions to the people.

The international division of labor, the social and cultural benefits of free trade and easy emigration, the global flow of information made possible by the internet – these are all to the good. However, there are some things that we want to be isolated from: war, tyranny, social and economic turmoil – isolation from these negative phenomena is much to be desired.

The isolationist label was first used by the enemies of peace as an epithet that made war opponents out to be unrealistic cranks, and since it was repeated endlessly by the pro-war media, the word became common parlance. But what is today reviled as “isolationism” – which is simply a policy of non-intervention in the affairs of other nations – is deeply rooted in American history.

In a week which began with the dubious Pentagon assertion that video footage of a missile launch shot by a KCBS news helicopter over Los Angeles was a vapor trail from a commercial jet distorted by light on the horizon at sunset, the notion that another federal agency could come up with a more ridiculous claim before the week was out seemed well-nigh impossible.

But that’s just what happened...

Just months after Wachovia Bank was assessed a record $160 million fine for laundering drug money used to buy a fleet of drug planes for Mexico’s Sinaloa cartel, the curious case of an American-registered airliner busted in the Yucatan carrying a massive multi-ton load of cocaine has burst back into the news... with a vengeance. The U.S. claims to have identified the global narcotics trafficker and “king among kingpins” who “coordinated the transportation to Mexico” of the now-famous last flight of a DC9 which took off from St. Petersburg FL on April 5 2006 before being busted, five days later, carrying 5.5 tons of cocaine.

In an indictment unsealed this week in Manhattan, Federal prosecutors fingered Syrian-born Walid Makled-Garcia, 43, a former crony of Venezuelan strongman Hugo Chavez, as the man behind the flight.

The inflation hawks are circling, warning of the dire consequences of the Fed's new QE2 scheme. "Quantitative easing" (QE) is Fedspeak for creating money out of nothing with a computer keystroke. The hawks say QE is massively inflationary; that it is responsible for soaring commodity prices here and abroad; that QE2 won't work any better than an earlier scheme called QE1, which was less about stimulating the economy than about saving the banks; and that QE has caused the devaluation of the dollar, which is hurting foreign currencies and driving up prices abroad.

It might be argued, however - and will be argued here - that QE2 not only will NOT produce these dire effects, but that it is NOT actually about saving the banks, OR devaluing the dollar, OR saving the housing market. It is about saving the government from having to raise taxes or cut programs, and saving Americans from the austerity measures crippling the Irish and the Greeks; and for that, it could well be an effective tool. What is increasing commodity and currency prices abroad is not QE, but the US dollar carry trade; and the carry trade is the result of pressure to keep interest rates artificially low to avoid a crippling interest tab on the federal debt. QE2 can relieve that pressure by funding the debt interest free.

The debt has increased by more than 50 percent since 2006, due to a collapsed economy and the decision to bail out the banks. By the end of 2009, the debt was up to $12.3 trillion; but the interest paid on it ($383 billion) was actually less than in 2006 ($406 billion), because interest rates had been pushed to extremely low levels. Interest now eats up nearly half the government's income tax receipts, which are estimated at $899 billion for FY 2010. Of this, $414 billion will go to interest on the federal debt. Raising interest rates just by a couple of percentage points would make income taxes prohibitive.

Interest rates cannot be raised again to reasonable levels until this interest tab is reduced. And, today, that can be done most expeditiously through QE2 - "monetizing" the debt through the government's own central bank. Only its own central bank will advance credit to the government interest free. Congress also has a computer keyboard and could issue the money not just debt free but interest free, but Congress has not been so bold since the Civil War. The Fed has, therefore, had to step in.

The devil is definitely in the details when it come to the results of a two-day talkfest among some of the world's most powerful leaders that was long on good intentions but short on solutions.

Lurking within the fine print of the ''summit leaders' declaration'' issued by the Group of 20 on Friday was the sense that no one is committed really to doing anything about the "imbalances" that are the primary concern of the United States and others suffering from huge deficits at the hands of China and other nations with huge trade surpluses.

All the leaders, from US President Barack Obama to China's President Hu Jintao could agree on the simple statement that "uneven growth and widening imbalances are fueling the temptation to diverge from global solutions into uncoordinated action". And they all agreed that "uncoordinated policy actions will only lead to worse outcomes for all."

The problem, though, was how to get beyond that platitude and on to anything like the "action" that would seem appropriate in what some people, notably the South Korean host, would like to go down in history as the "Seoul Action Plan".

Plans are in motion for a “false flag” attack on America. Iran will be blamed, everyone knows that and Iran will be totally innocent. This is the last thing Iran would ever want. The most likely scenario is a nuclear attack. Two bombs are missing, bombs built by Israel in South Africa and lost long ago. These were supposedly Saddam’s bombs. Now we are told Iran has them. Israel has had them all along and the fear, they may be inside the United States already.

The Israeli game with these weapons is one of the worst kept secrets in the world and has already cost the deaths of many. It will take nothing short of the detonation of one of this Hiroshima sized Israeli nukes to push America into Israel’s war with Iran, much as hunting for these nukes which Israel informed President Bush were in Iraq, led “the decider” to making one of the many blunders of his career. Our next 9/11 will be nuclear.

The purpose will be to push America into a 20 year war that will destroy Iran and Pakistan, take oil to over $300 per barrel and collapse the dollar and Euro. Iran isn’t Iraq of 2003, toothless and starving. This will be America’s last military adventure, and the end of America’s place in the world as we know it. We know the details of the proposed military campaign and the military and political leaders who support it are the worst imaginable incompetents and traitors.

Invading Iran is an impossible task for America. Other than there be no reason whatsoever to engage in such folly, something that, of recent years, seems to concern fewer and fewer Americans. Turn on the TV, if the “rodeo clown” says “wipe ‘em out” then we do it.

The Republican Party’s takeover of the House of Representatives in the recent election also ushers in a consolidation of pro-Israeli political influence over Congress unlike ever before. Then, too—not coincidentally—it heralds a new era in which secret campaign contributions by big-money interests are now holding sway in an unprecedented way.

Exemplifying these new developments is the rapid-fire rise of Rep. Eric Cantor (R-Va.), a deeply religious Orthodox Jew and pro-Israeli “neo-conservative” hard-liner who is expected to be named House majority leader in the forthcoming GOP-controlled Congress.

Although the majority leader post is officially the No. 2 slot in the House of Representatives, the truth is, Cantor will hold tremendous behind-the-scenes power in the Republican caucus—greater than even Rep. John Boehner (R-Ohio), who is slated to become speaker of the House (and with whom Cantor has never been on the best of terms).

Cantor’s particular influence stems from his control—along with another pro-Israeli hardliner, former Sen. Norm Coleman (R-Minn.)—of a secretive and well-funded political action committee, the American Action Network (AAN), run by Cantor’s close advisor and former chief of staff, Rob Collins.

If it is the first responsibility of the Federal Reserve to protect the dollars that Americans earn and save, is it not dereliction of duty for the Fed to pursue a policy to bleed value from those dollars? For that is what Chairman Ben Bernanke is up to with his QE2, or "quantitative easing."

Translation: The Fed is committed to buy $600 billion in bonds from banks and pay for them by printing money that will then be deposited in those banks. The more dollars that flood into the economy, the less every one of them is worth.

Bernanke is not just risking inflation. He is inducing inflation.

He is reducing the value of the dollar to make U.S. exports more competitive and imports more expensive, so that we will consume fewer imports. He is trying to eliminate the U.S. trade deficit by treating the once-universally respected dollar like the peso of a banana republic.

Today's veterans are survivors of more than a half century of American wars—World War II, Vietnam, Panama, Grenada, the 1991 Gulf War (which has never been officially declared over), and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. As we celebrate our veterans this week, we would do well to remember the following realities that the public is barely aware of, but veterans know only too well:

1) It took almost 50 years for the government to acknowledge the suffering of more than 200,000 U.S. veterans exposed to the herbicide Agent Orange.2) Almost a third of the 700,000 veterans of the 1991 Gulf War suffer from a profound physiological disorder called Gulf War Illness (formerly Gulf War Syndrome).3) Veterans of ongoing fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan have suffered a variety of physical traumas beyond the widespread maiming and loss of limbs.4) On any given night, more than 200,000 veterans are homeless, and 1.5 million veterans are considered at risk for homelessness.5) The population of homeless women has skyrocketed from 5 to 20 percent over the last decade as more women are deployed into battle.6) Over a half million Iraq and Afghanistan veterans are patients in the VA system. 7) Every day, five U.S. soldiers attempt suicide, a 500 percent increase since 2001.8) The number of U.S. service men and women killed in Afghanistan has doubled in the first quarter of 2010, compared to the same quarter last year.9) Estimates of civilian deaths from violence in Iraq alone range from a conservative 105,000 (Iraq Body Count project) to over 1.2 million (UK pollster Opinion Research Business), with estimates by Johns Hopkins at 655,000.10) U.S. veterans live with these horrific realities daily. Many are acutely aware as they suffer, of the suffering they have inflicted on others.

Private military and security companies (PMSC) are the modern reincarnation of a long lineage of private providers of physical force: corsairs, privateers and mercenaries. Mercenaries, which had practically disappeared during the XIXth and XXth centuries, reappeared in the 1960’s during the decolonization period operating mainly in Africa and Asia. Under the United Nations a convention was adopted which outlaws and criminalizes their activities. Additional Protocol I of the Geneva Conventions also contains a definition of mercenary.

These non-state entities of the XXIst century operate in extremely blurred situations where the frontiers are difficult to separate. The new security industry of private companies moves large quantities of weapons and military equipment. It provides services for military operations recruiting former militaries as civilians to carry out passive or defensive security.

However, these individuals cannot be considered as civilians, given that they often carry and use weapons, interrogate prisoners, load bombs, drive military trucks and fulfill other essential military functions. Those who are armed can easily switch from a passive/defensive to an active/offensive role and can commit human rights violations and even destabilize governments. They cannot be considered soldiers or supporting militias under international humanitarian law either, since they are not part of the army or in the chain of command, and often belong to a large number of different nationalities.

PMSC personnel cannot usually be considered to be mercenaries for the definition of mercenaries as stipulated in the international conventions dealing with this issue does not generally apply to the personnel of PMSCs which are legally operating in foreign countries under contracts of legally registered companies.

As world leaders have gathered in Asia for the Group of 20 (G-20) summit to discuss measures to revitalize the frail global economy, tensions have risen over struggling currencies and trade. Likewise, President Obama and other world leaders in Seoul, South Korea for the two-day summit are having to contend with one another's opposing strategies for fostering a more stable economic environment and preventing a looming financial meltdown.

The first G-20 leaders’ summit took place two years ago and has since witnessed the growth of nations like China and India. Fox News explains that the aim of this year’s summit “is to craft a new global economic order to replace one powered by the U.S. running huge trade deficits while countries like China, Germany and Japan accumulate vast surpluses.”

While much was disputed during the summit, several agreements were made, including one that involves increasing supervision of financial institutions, and another that entails providing greater financial support to developing countries by way of the International Monetary Fund — an organization in which the United States is a 17-percent shareholder, making the U.S. the largest IMF shareholder in the world. In other words, the U.S. bears a larger financial burden than any other nation in the world, in some cases more than triple that of other nations.

Likewise, the decision to place more financial control in the hands of the IMF legitimizes concerns posed by The New American in the past few years that “the global elites driving the G8/G20 agenda have been aiming at transforming the IMF into a global equivalent of the Federal Reserve.”

Although it received very little coverage in the mainstream media, Barack Obama made some comments about globalism during his speech in Mumbai, India that were very eye-opening. As he was discussing the new realities of world trade in 2010, Obama warned against "those who see globalization as a threat" and he spoke of the "integrated world" in which we all now live. But is merging the entire globe into a one world economy, a one world financial system and a one world labor market really the best thing for the American people?

For the past two decades, all U.S. presidents have been heralding the benefits of merging the American economy with the rest of the globe. George Bush Sr., Bill Clinton, George W. Bush and Barack Obama have all steadfastly supported the emerging one world economy. These presidents have each used different terms to describe this process such as "globalism", "globalization", "an integrated world", "the global economy" and even "a New World Order", but they have all meant the same thing. All of these presidents have sought to integrate the United States even more deeply into the developing one world economic system.

Barack Obama showed very clearly how he feels about globalism when he made the following statement during his speech in Mumbai....

"This will keep America on its toes. America is going to have to compete. There is going to be a tug-of-war within the US between those who see globalization as a threat and those who accept we live in a open integrated world, which has challenges and opportunities."

A global backlash has emerged against the Federal Reserve’s blatant policy of devaluing the dollar by printing $600 billion out of thin air, a move that analysts, economists, foreign ministers and even the Fed’s own employees charge will only serve to stall economic recovery and initiate trade and currency wars.

On the eve of the G20 summit in Seol, finance ministers in China, Brazil, Russia and the euro zone have denounced the Fed’s quantitative easing, adding to an already deafening chorus of critics.

China’s suggestion that the G20 should monitor and regulate the Fed’s decision making, however, represents a further step toward world governance of domestic economic policy. The option facing the American people would then be between a private banking cartel running the US, as it currently does, or an unelected world government.

It is this very fusion of power that the intentional decimation of the global economy serves.

Printing excessive amounts of money, tampering with interest rates and alienating emerging economies abroad is exactly what caused the crisis in the first place, so why is exactly the same thing being done again? Because a cartel of elites knows that out of the chaos this engenders they can consolidate and prosper.